Seriously Div was my spring board into PC game making type things. It got me into PC zone, Edge and PC plus magazine and a shiny graphics card (the
second one as some naughty person stole the first one).

It also started me on my Journey through FastTrak and Avanquest until recently where they cruelly chucked me out for good behaviour. But hey I
survived longer than any other FastTrakker so that has to be something to be proud of.

So to anyone that remembers me Hello. Oh and hello to all those that joined us in Milton Keynes that once when we met Daniel. Still have the photo
of us all

I wanted making games on PC because i made little BASIC games on Commodore 64. Also, i bought Game Maker 2000 (with a fine german handbook) and tried
it. Some days i found DIV Arena and i fell in love .

After DIV Arena closed i made games with Blitz Basic. So, i can/could make games for Windows in True Color and Stereo sound. ^^

After many years, i found the DIV Arena 2.0 and Mike at YouTube. So, i become a beta tester and i'm here. The DIV Arena community was the finest and
best communities ever found in web and i hope the 2.0 will be fine again.

PS:
i found my Game Maker 2000 Box with original CD and, of course, the german handbook.

of course nooooo, why should i threw it in the bin? My last programming action with DIV is very long time ago (i think 2004), so i can read all about
functions/processes etc. Blitz Basic is very different to DIV.

Along with my utterly awful retro remakes entry as well I see... thankfully I've got better since then. Least I think I have...
In fact, since then I went on to University to do one of them game programming courses, did Dare to be Digital, then went up and down the UK for half
a year knocking on doors to get a job.
Ended up in Liverpool for a few years at a little indie dev, before moving back up to Dundee.
Started Arcade Badgers! didn't get too far with it due to illness and things, but it's ticking along still as a side project.
Now at YoYo Games, so technically the enemy as I work on GameMaker:Studio

hehe, no. It is in english ... only the manual (book) is in german but i started to translate DIV to german. It isn't easy because some message are
curios xD. Currently the IDE is (90%) finish and some messages (30%).

It's times like this I wish I was a bit more active on the forums back in the day, I very much doubt anyone will remember me. All of my game ideas
were way too ambitious so I never finished anything, but I had a great time learning an experimenting. I remember hanging around on the IRC channel
quite a bit. They were good times.

A couple of my best friends, whom I only communicate with online, were guys I met because of DIV. And although I started learning to program years
before DIV was around, it was another opportunity to keep programming and honing my skills leading to me becoming the developer I am today.

All of my game ideas were way too ambitious so I never finished anything

Yep that was me all over!! I wish that a game design video series like Extra
Credits existed back then, I've watched through a lot of that and they talk a lot of sense in terms of minimum viable product, failing faster etc. One
of my issues is that simpler games don't peak my interest, so I often didn't finish more basic things.

I guess I should do some kind of little update on myself then! As most of you folks probably guessed, I didn't go back into game development or
continue with it as a career. I love coming up with ideas for games and I have bundles of creativity but I'm just not logically minded enough for it,
I can't follow long strings of nested statements or keep all these various concepts in mind simultaneously when programming so most things i made were
either inefficient or utterly broken. I could (and still can) memorise routines - like how to code a particle engine from scratch, or how to check for
hardness maps etc, or basic jumping physics, but anything more complicated than that leaves me in the dark with no idea where to go, so I switched to
a different industry. I now do fashion and print design! Who woulda thunk it. I went to university in London and now I live here, I'm currently
setting up my own clothing brand and doing the odd commission

I'm still working on a few little side things here and there though in terms of programming, though the project I'm doing currently is a salvage of an
old unfinished game I started making while DIV-ARENA was down. It's a Bennu project and I'm still hashing it out, hopefully you'll all see it soon and
it'll make up for the mostly terrible things I created back in the day.

I'm tempted to have a fiddle around with Unity at some point to make some simplistic 3D games - but to be honest it can't take priority any more like
it used to. I'm particularly interested in the one button porting claim, as the few ideas I have would run really well on Android! Anyway - I hope
y'all are well and stuff :D

Ha, what I've read having ambitious ideas and never really finishing is a, or even the, common pitfall among game developers. Good and bad. Or wannabe
game developers if you're a bit cruel.

BreadCaster: I think you can advertise, I mean mention specifically, what you're doing. I'd like to check it out. Please tell me. I bag you! Also,
about Unity, I haven't tried to make anything for Android but I've had to make something for iOS and, albeit porting is really that simple, you still
should develop specifically for mobile because of the limiting hardware. Set aside controls, even simple 2d can have horrible performance if you make
certain things mobile devices aren't really good at it. This is well document and not difficult at all but it needs to be addressed. Disclaimber: been
a few years but I doubt devices have advanced that much.

Yes. Although I'm now wondering if I'm actually thinking of the GP32 IRC channel as that was the thing I moved on to next after DIV and BlitzBasic
It's all so long ago (18 years since original release I think?) that it all has blurred into one a little bit!

It's times like this I wish I was a bit more active on the forums back in the day, I very much doubt anyone will remember me.

I still remember you!

Have I fallen into a coma and it's now 1999 again...yet I am just older and fatter... well it's been a long time, DIV was my first foray into game
making, which lead me on to studying game making at uni and then never looking at it every again haha. I now 'try' and program for a living but my
employer may disagree with me in that terms. I still have fond memories of the chat though and the randomness that it contained. I, like most
people, never actually got anything decent finished though.

BreadCaster: I think you can advertise, I mean mention specifically, what you're doing. I'd like to check it out. Please tell me. I bag you! Also,
about Unity, I haven't tried to make anything for Android but I've had to make something for iOS and, albeit porting is really that simple, you still
should develop specifically for mobile because of the limiting hardware. Set aside controls, even simple 2d can have horrible performance if you make
certain things mobile devices aren't really good at it. This is well document and not difficult at all but it needs to be addressed. Disclaimber: been
a few years but I doubt devices have advanced that much.

Oh yeah, no the few ideas I have planned are intuitive as far as the controls are concerned - a flat shaded/sparsely textured low poly rail shooter
with cursor aiming (so tap where you want to shoot), similar to Killer 7. Swipe up to move forward a square, left to turn 90 degrees left, swipe right
to turn 90 degrees right, tap on an enemy to shoot at them - sort of like Reboot level graphics (man, remember that old show?) - I've played games (or
even higher spec, actually) like that played on my own android phone so I know they can do it =)

Welcome back MadCow. nothing has changed except we are finally getting the DIV we always dreamed of

Thanks Mike, it feels weird to be sat on a bus looking at the DIV forums on my phone if I'm honest haha. I look forward to having a play when I get
the chance, I think my DIV manual is still lying about somewhere. I might finish Madcows or even start Syndicow.

All of my game ideas were way too ambitious so I never finished anything

One of the problems I had and have with DIV is the fact that organizing your code gets difficult as your game grows bigger. You're stuck with one file
so after a while you lose track of your processes, local variables, globals, etc...

However, I think there are ways to program more efficiently, while waiting for the ability to include code snippets into your code you could find
other ways to succesfully develop good-structured code (some basic things like prefixing your variables with "l_" for local and "g_" for global is one
way to do it)

I am planning to think this through, but as for know I do not feel like spending too much of my free time on it.

Well if a process isn't self explanatory in it's name, then I usually add a comment. Sometimes I add comments to IF statements as I program them, just
to remind me what they do later on if it's not immediately obvious.

Additionally, while I never got to the stage of adding L_ for local and G_ for global, I did start to prefix all the global asset variables with
things like gfx_, sfx_, fnt_ etc. That's what I'm still doing for CyberCrisis, actually.

Yeah I know but you should be able to logically group processes in a seperate file and access its local variables by declaring them as public in the
process itself instead of all the local variables on top of the PRG... Hmmm oh well...

const

global

begin

end

process a_process()
public
private
begin
end

etc... I think you can do something like this with Bennu. Not sure though.